Scars, Visible and Invisible, in Bosnia

But when Matteo Bastianelli asked people he met in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he could hear the pain in their answers.

“They start to say, ‘I was 15 when the Bosnian war started,’ ” said Mr. Bastianelli, an Italian photographer. “It’s like people are locked in the past.”

Mr. Bastianelli moved to Sarajevo, the capital, in 2009, drawn to
stories he had heard on previous visits. He spent the next four years
working on “The Bosnian Identity,”
a dark project that explores the hidden emotional wounds left by the
1992-95 war that changed the country. He sought to ask what it meant to
move on after enduring such ravaging violence.

“At the beginning, I just looked around me and saw that the city was
full of scars,” he said. “The holes made by machine-gun fire are
everywhere in Sarajevo. It’s really scary to see.